Rinat Rosenberg Kima

Post doc

Rinat is a postdoc at the Curiosity Lab. She returned to Israel after 10 years in the USA during which she completed her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Learning Systems from Florida State University, and a two-year postdoc as a senior assessment specialist as part of a digital science curriculum project at UC Berkeley. She also has an M.A. degree in Psychology from Tel-Aviv University, and a B.A. degree in Computer Sciences and Economics from Tel-Aviv University. Her greatest passion is learning, helping others to learn, and understanding what learning is (all of which may apply to humans, robots, and the interaction between them).

The use of social robots as peers and tutors for children in educational settings and as social companions for adults has been increasingly explored in recent years. Could social robots facilitate active learning in higher education? Our vision for this project is to take Human Robot Interaction to higher education by utilizing robots as facilitators of small groups discussion in higher education and beyond. The introduction of MOOCs and online learning technologies has generated a big impact on higher education. We believe that the future of higher education will enable students to listen to lectures at home and will enable class time to be devoted to more effective active learning activities (the flipped classroom model). The robotator is one such learning activity that can be used to fill the gap of active learning activities that usually require personal or alternatively very small classes to enable meaningful small groups interaction